So if we take its eventual release as a given, how much (or what pieces) of the promised gameplay would you need in order to feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth?
I tend to look at kickstarters as a crapshoot. So if it fails, it fails, as a self employed person I spend way more on ideas that didnt work out all the time. I also regularly purchase early access games on steam. A few times I have been disappointed, but more often I got a decent game I was happy with.
My “guideline” if you will is $1 an hour. If I spend $30 on a game and it amused me for 30 hours, I am a happy customer.
Somebody mentioned this to me today - I hadn’t checked on the game in a while. Squadron 42 has been delayed until some time next year (no date), and the team is going to slow its release schedule, possibly only doing quarterly releases.
Any backers have insight about the current state of the alpha?
From your link:
750 bucks for a virtual ship.
For a game that isn’t playable yet, and has no projected release date for one small section of it, let alone the whole thing.
edited to add: Perhaps the thread title should be modified to read “Star Citizen is the far, far Future of PC Gaming…”?
I don’t get it? People are buy an unfinished game you can’t even play yet? In some cases, spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars for in game content? That’s insane. I’ve bought “in development” games before (DayZ and Space Engineers). But I only spent like $25 and got hundreds or thousands of hours of mostly quality gameplay. I didn’t buy No Man’s Sky because the reviews cut it to pieces.
Sorry, but I just don’t get it. Are people afraid they will run out of copies once it’s released?
Look, I have to say it 'cause someone’s going to; who owns this game company, Donald Trump?
I think it’s an emotional investment the investors have-they have literally spent too much time and too much money to admit that they blew it and, like a gambler that has blown the paycheck and should have left the casino many hours ago, they feel the only way they can retain their honor is to double-down on the bet and pray it pays off.
People are so damn impatient. I don’t know why people are treating this as vaporware. We’re regularing seeing new, extended footage with new features all the time. A game like this could easily take 5 or 6 years to develop. It’s a huge, ambitious, revolutionary game. It’s not a yearly installment of Call of Duty that changed 3 minor things.
It’s just that usually when this happens, it’s kept quiet until a year or two until it’s ready to release. So people aren’t used to hearing about a game for 6 years, so they assume that means this one was vaporware. But obviously given the crowd funding and business model, this one couldn’t have received 4 years of silent development before announcement.
I don’t know why people get so excited for a game that they get angry constantly that it isn’t out yet. Just wait until it’s released and see then if it’s worthwhile.
For one thing: $750 for a ship that has a possibility of never arriving.
A $60 pre-order gets you all het up but this doesn’t? The mind boggles.
I can totally understand that. What I do not understand is people paying huge amounts of money for it. $750 for a ship? For $750 I want a piece of the action. Stock in the company.
Games take many years and millions to develop and make. But so do movies. I’ll pay my money to see the next Batman movie when it’s actually a finished product ready for me to enjoy it.
If Star Citizen ever happens, I’ll buy it and enjoy it for $60. Until then it is flatly insane to pay hundreds of dollars for “ships” in a game that is not actually a game.
Unless you want another warning, drop this. For one, you were told to drop it in the original thread, but for two, this doesn’t even have any bearing on THIS thread. Don’t bring up other topics/posts in threads not about them, please.
If you are really still upset over it, make a Pit thread.
SenorBeef, please don’t get yourself into trouble by replying. Make a Pit thread, one of you, if you want to start quibbling with each other.
I’m not being hostile. Thought that was allowed.
Fun game: the dollar auction. If you don’t want to read it, the way it works is you auction off $1.00 to the highest bidder, which can be a bid as little as a penny. The only catch is, if your bid is second highest, you still have to pay. That is, if the winning bid is $0.25, and you bid $0.24, the winning bidder pays a quarter and gets the dollar, and you pay $0.24 and get nothing.
I’ve done it with students (with points they’d earned in another game, instead of with real money). The article’s description of the shift in mood is exactly what happens.
Wonder if that’s what’s going on here?
Bringing up bickering from another, outside thread (especially one you were warned over) in a different thread usually isn’t allowed, no.
Please make a thread in ATMB if you have any further questions or want to contest the note or ask about it further.
$750 for a ship is pretty silly. But as a backer who has pledged over $200 over time I can share a bit of my personal experience.
It started innocent enough. When the game was first announced I was pretty excited, and backed the game with a starter package. Over time my excitement has waxed and waned, but from time to time there would seem to be some decent progress and I’d end up trading up. Their store system makes it very easy to exchange you package for something else through store credit. So after a while I find myself having spent more than I had planned, because each step seemed incremental.
Would I do it all over again? No, probably not. Seeing the release date slip and the feature bloat, it isn’t really what I was expecting. But I don’t really regret spending it. The developers have been pretty open about everything, and while there has been a lot of hype, they haven’t shown anything that’s misleading. Pretty much everything they’ve shown in demonstrations previously has been released to the public in the alpha test. I’m still hopeful that the final product will be good, even if it ends up being many years later than originally promised.
The development process of this game has been pretty interesting to see. The amount of behind the scenes content being released is huge. I think it is pretty unique in game development, in that it’s almost like a reality show. They in fact produced an actual reality show, as a contest to design a ship that will appear in the final game (the team I was rooting for lost). I think it’s been both a boon and a handicap to the developers. While they’ve attracted a lot of die-hard fans, they’ve also gotten a lot of criticism. It made the hype train worse and probably added to the partisanship of the fans and critics. Yes, a lot of fans will bash any hints of criticism, probably at least in part because they’re way too invested in this game, but I think the opposite is also true, that some critics are overly critical because of the backlash against the hype.
Anyways, for myself, I’ve settled into a ‘wait and see’ attitude. The latest tech demos shown are genuinely impressive, and while I have always been annoyed by the overly priced ships, it’s true that nobody actually needs to buy them. The basic package is I believe $45 which will let you try the alpha client, and there are occasional promotions where anyone can try it without pledging.
In the end I think there is a difference between pre-ordering a game and pledging to support the development of a game. Whether or not it is actually good for gamers, I don’t know. But I have gotten some enjoyment out of seeing the process of the crowdfunding and development, and there’s always the chance that the game will turn out to be good. And if not, well that’ll be entertaining in a whole different way.
I only have the basic package of this, I think anyway, I need to check. But I certainly haven’t spent multiple hundreds on it. OTOH, I ended up spending over $800 on Shroud of the Avatar. Knight Marshal I think. I could have easily spent more with more time. Thank ghu there wasn’t more time. 
Fall 2016 Free Fly is now active.
This means that you can get in game yourselves, without paying anything, and have a look around at what they’ve got available at the moment.
Click here to get started.
What are the current hardware and software requirements for running this game?
There’s a list here
My CPU doesn’t quite meet the Recommended specs, and it’s a bit slow and jittery in places. From the sound of it, though, it’s a bit slow and jittery in places for everyone. It is alpha, after all.
Out of curiosity, I did some research into the full history of Star Citizen.
The game is doomed. I guess “Vaporware” is the wrong term, because “vaporware” doesn’t really fit the business moderl Star Citizen is being built under. “Ponzi scheme” is also not exactly right, because I think Chris Roberts really is trying to produce a game. But it’s become a fundraising effort, not a game design.
This is going to end very, very badly.